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Ĭhildren preparing for evacuation during the Spanish Civil War (1930s), some giving the Republican salute. It is perhaps best known in this era from its use during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, as a greeting by the Republican faction, and known as the " Popular Front salute" or the " anti-fascist salute". The gesture of the raised fist was apparently known in the United States as well, and is seen in a photograph from a May Day march in New York City in 1936. In reaction, the Nazi Party adopted the well-known Roman salute two years later.

The use of the fist as a salute by communists and antifascists is first evidenced in 1924, when it was adopted for the Communist Party of Germany's Roter Frontkämpferbund ("Alliance of Red Front-Fighters"). In the United States, clenched fist was described by the magazine Mother Earth as "symbolical of the social revolution" in 1914. A large raised fist rising from a crowd of striking workers was used to promote a mass strike in Budapest in 1912. Journalist and socialist activist John Reed described hearing a similar description from a participant in the strike. William "Big Bill" Haywood, a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World, used the metaphor of a fist as something greater than the sum of its parts during a speech at the 1913 Paterson silk strike. Its use in trade unionism, anarchism, and the labor movement had begun by the 1910s. The origin of the raised fist as either a symbol or gesture is unclear. This 1912 poster by Mihály Bíró uses the fist as a symbol of the collective power of the massed workers from whom it rises.